Last night some friends and I did a little beacon practice. We went up to a friend's house in the woods, put a beacon in a plastic bag, and hid it for each other. All was going well ... until on the 5th or 6th try, the beacon disappeared. The signal we were getting wasn't anywhere near the "avalanche path." The person who hid it swore up and down he hadn't pulled a trick on us. So we followed the signal, in the opposite direction of where it should have been. We got within about half a meter and couldn't get a closer reading with the beacon. We were all a little spooked, and couldn't figure out where exactly the thing was. After searching with a flashlight for about ten minutes, I realized that the closest reading we were getting was next to an exposed tree root. I dug around a little bit, and found the damn thing buried under the root. The plastic bag had teeth marks in it which looked suspiciously like a dog's. One of my friends had brought her dog along, and I remembered him running out of that general area right before we started. At this point, he was nosing around, playing innocent.
So we went back to practicing, and the same thing happened again! This time, the dog carried it down a steep hillside, and buried it under a huge alder bush. Now that we knew what was going on, it only took about five minute of digging around in the dark on our bellies to find the thing. The dog looked kind of hurt, as if he had hoped it would take us longer.
At least we know we can find the beacons ...
